Campin' in the San Juans

Everything went wrong, but I still got some great shots

Seems that I could never stay in one place very long. So it was that I only spent a couple of months at the Hippie Pot-Smoking Paradise RV Park (see my last few posts) and was soon on my way down south, to the San Juan mountains, to make my first attempt at being a USFS campground host. Actually, an assistant host.

The couple running the Matterhorn Campground had requested assistance from their manager. I was hired to go assist them.

Now, Matterhorn is a ghost town a few miles out of Telluride. It’s a pretty place on State Route 145 at about 9500 feet above sea level. The Forest Service campground there is reportedly the most popular one in the Uncompahgre (now part of the GMUG¹) National Forest. Here’s a shot taken from the highway with the old historic ore processing mill at the bottom of the shot.

A spectacular ridge with the historic Matterhorn ore mill on bottom right

The campground is just off the left edge of this photo.

I only lasted three days. Never even got a paycheck. Short version is that the wife half of the host couple was a chain-smoking old hag that expected me to have the energy and stamina of a youngster in his twenties, and was constantly on my tail to clean the bathrooms faster. I didn’t retire from a successful career as a Linux system administrator to be treated like trash.

In the evenings I roamed the campground taking photos, mostly of the wildflowers blooming there. Here are two of them:

Polemonium, left, and Cinquefoil, right. Click to enlarge

And here’s a nice shot of backlit trees, taken at the campground.

Backlit trees at the Matterhorn campground

And there’s an awesome view of that cliff face from the campground:

Cliff face at Matterhorn, Colorado

Neither this cliff, nor the ridge it is on, has a name. Topo maps show that it’s a part of two mountains - San Miguel Peak on the left, and Sheep Mountain on the right. It is made entirely of volcanic tuff that suffered a (geological) blowout some hundreds to thousands of years ago.

A beautiful campground, most of which is RV friendly, and one I would highly recommend. It’s just that I couldn’t work for those people.

When I pulled out on my third morning there, the husband half of the camp host team was cleaning the bathrooms while the wife sat out on the golf cart smoking her cigarettes. She never lifted a finger to do any of the actual work.

1. A merger of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests